Loving My Enemy's Son

Chapter 6 — The Name He Gave Me

LOVING MY ENEMY'S SON

Chapter 6 — The Name He Gave Me



"Say it," Tiara said. "Whatever it is. Just say it."



Gabriel was quiet on the other end of the line for a moment that felt far too long. "Not on the phone. Come to the house."



She was there within the hour, still in the clothes she'd worn out of the hospital, her hair still damp at the temples from the washroom sink. Gabriel was waiting at the table when she came in — the same table he'd used for every hard thing he'd ever told her, scarred steel that had held more truths over the years than either of them probably wanted to count.



"Tell me," she said, sitting across from him.



"I have a name," Gabriel said. "Someone connected to the family that ordered the attack on your parents." He watched her face carefully as he said it, the way he always did before handing her something heavy. "De Luca."



The word landed in the quiet room and sat there, heavier than she expected it to be after ten years of waiting for exactly this moment.



She didn't move. She had trained herself too well, for too long, to let her face do anything her mind hadn't approved first. "You're certain."



"I'm as certain as ten years of careful work can make me."



"That's not the same as certain."



"No," Gabriel admitted. "It isn't."



Tiara sat with that. Ten years ago she might have taken a name and run with it, furious and young and desperate for somewhere to point all that grief. She wasn't that girl anymore. She had spent a decade learning that memories lied, that evidence could be built as easily as it could be found, that certainty handed to you by someone else was still, in the end, someone else's certainty and not your own.



"Tell me what they had to do with the sport," she said instead. "The combat circuit. You've mentioned it before."



"The De Lucas have influence over most of it," Gabriel said. "Sponsorships, betting lines, certain fights arranged to go a particular way before anyone steps into the ring. It's a business wearing a sport's clothes, and it moves a great deal of money for a great many dangerous people." He paused. "Your father found out something about it. Not long before he died. I don't know exactly what — only that whatever it was, it frightened him enough to start making arrangements he'd never made before. The phone he had your mother give you. That was part of it."



Tiara's jaw tightened. "He knew someone might come."



"He knew something was wrong. I don't think even he understood how close it already was."



She looked down at her own hands on the table — steady, the way they'd been steady in the operating room this morning, the way she had spent a decade teaching them to be steady no matter what was happening underneath. "Were you there that night?"



The pause that followed lasted only a second. But Tiara had spent ten years learning to read exactly that kind of second — the half-beat before a person answered a question they'd rehearsed the answer to.



"I arrived too late," Gabriel said. "You know that. You were there when I found you."



She held his eyes a moment longer than the answer required, some old, careful part of her weighing it the way she weighed everything now — turning it over, checking the edges, looking for the seam.



She believed him. For now.



"Why didn't you tell me all of this ten years ago?"



"Because a twelve-year-old with a name and no patience gets herself killed," Gabriel said, plainly. "I needed you to have both the skill and the discipline to survive whatever you decided to do with it. You have both now. That's why I'm telling you tonight and not before."



Something in Tiara cracked, quietly, sitting at that table — not from anger, though the anger was there too, banked low the way it had been for ten years. It was something older than the anger. Something she'd buried so deep under discipline and scalpel work and sixteen-hour shifts that she'd almost convinced herself it had stopped existing at all.



She thought about her father's hand on her hair. *You'll be brilliant, principessa.*



She thought about her mother's crooked tiramisu, made worse on purpose so a little girl's version could be the one that went to the table.



*I still miss them,* she thought, and let herself think it fully, for the first time in longer than she could remember, without immediately reaching for the discipline that usually smothered the thought before it finished forming. *I still miss them so much it hasn't gotten smaller. It's only gotten quieter.*



She didn't say any of that out loud. Gabriel wouldn't have needed her to. He was watching her face with the particular attention of a man who had learned, over a decade, to read every small thing she tried not to show.



"I want evidence," she said finally, once she'd folded the grief back down into the place she kept it. "Not a name. Not your certainty. I want something I can hold in my own hands before I decide what to do with any of this."



Something shifted in Gabriel's expression — not disapproval, exactly, but the look of a man recalculating something he thought he already understood about the person in front of him.



"You don't want to just—"



"No." Her voice was flat, certain, the same voice she used in an operating room when a decision needed to be made and there wasn't time to debate it. "I'm not going to destroy a man's life because you handed me his name over a table. If he's guilty, I'll know it myself before I act on it. I owe my parents that much. I owe myself that much."



Gabriel studied her for a long moment, and something in his face — old, tired, faintly proud in a way he didn't fully let show — settled into place.



"All right," he said quietly. "Then let's start with the man currently in position to inherit everything."



He reached into a folder at his elbow and drew out a single photograph, sliding it across the table between them.



"Mario De Luca," Gabriel said. "The current heir. He's also one of the most influential fighters in the international circuit — which means, if there's a connection between your father's death and that world, Mario sits closer to the center of it than almost anyone alive."



Tiara looked down at the photograph.



The face was unfamiliar — dark hair, a jaw set with the particular stillness of a man used to being watched. She had never seen him before in her life, not once, not in any file, not in any memory she could name.



And yet something about his eyes wasn't unfamiliar at all. Something in them tugged at a place in her memory she couldn't quite reach, distant and formless, gone before she could hold onto it long enough to understand why.



Her fingers tightened around the edge of the photograph.



Gabriel watched her carefully, the way he watched everything that mattered.



"You don't need to understand him, Tiara," he said quietly.



She looked up, and something had gone very still and very cold behind her eyes — the look of a woman who had just decided, in that exact moment, exactly what she intended this photograph to become.



"I only need to know how to destroy him."